An ion trap can control atoms for quantum experimentsY. Colombe/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY After decades of looking, researchers have seen a string of atoms go through a 1D phase change so elusive that it could only...
A robotic exoskeleton can train people to move their fingers more quicklyShinichi Furuya A robotic hand exoskeleton can help expert pianists learn to play even faster by moving their fingers for them. Robotic exoskeletons have long been used to rehabilitate...
Rachel Feltman: If you stubbed your toe right now, what sound would you make? According to linguists, the chances are pretty good that your answer would be surprisingly similar to the one given by someone on the other side of...
If you’ve ever done any public outreach work for astronomy—if you’ve given open lectures, volunteered at a stargazing event, written about the sky, done anything—then at some point you’ve had to warn people not to look directly at the sun.The...
One of my favorite anecdotes about prime numbers concerns Alexander Grothendieck, who was among the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. According to one account, he was once asked to name a prime number during a conversation. These numbers,...
Dingo gap in Gale craterNASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS From H. G. Wells’s alien invaders in The War of the Worlds to The Martian‘s abandoned astronaut, we have long been inspired by the idea that life could reside on Mars – human or otherwise....
Maarten Wouters/Getty Images The Shape of Things UnseenAdam Zeman (Bloomsbury Circus) Just imagine! No, seriously, just imagine: an apple, perhaps, or a cartful of apples, or even a kingdom in which monstrous apples are fought by oranges on horseback. Our...
Delivering “some felons to a labour camp on a remote planet” … Alien ClayShutterstock / Space creator They say never start a story with a waking, but when you’ve been hard asleep for thirty years it’s difficult to know where...
“A world organised along very different lines to Earth” … Alien ClayScience Photo Library/Alamy “Hard” science fiction exists to push the boundaries of the imagination in a very specific way: thought experiments that start with the known and the possible,...
The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has been recording atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1958FRED ESPENAK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere measured by a weather station at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii increased by...
